B

Jeremy Pinson 16267-064

SECURE ADMIN UNIT

PO BOX 3000

WHITE DEER, PA  17887

 

Dear Senator,

For as long as long as I live, I will never forget the names of Timethea Pullen, Brandi Reynolds, Alison and Karl Leukfeld, Shannon Robbins, Jeffrey Burkett, Donald Lewis, Rick Stover, and most of all Mark Gutierrez.  These are the names of the people responsible for my being raped by a staff member – Lieutenant K. Ackley – and then tortured for telling the truth.  Here is how.

 

Those names belong to the administrative body within the BOP that calls itself the Transgender Executive Council, and Mark Gutierrez was a Warden at my priso n facility.  The TEC’s job was to find a place to house trans women, including me, and what they are supposed to look for is a gender affirming environment to fit the needs of the individual.  But at my prior facility, USP Tucson, when I decided not to settle a civil lawsuit, went to trial, and won, the TEC decided to hurt me when they got the the chance.  Mark Gutierrez would hand them the opportunity and they took me from a place where I spent most days trying t find new ways to make inventive dishes out of supplies you could purchase from the commissary, reading a good book or watching a movie, maybe even walking the track with my friends in the sunshine of Arizona.  But then one day, Mark Gutierrez – a bully and a tyrant – called a town hall of all LGBT inmates in USP Tucson to berate them in an ugly, vile, vulgar and discriminatory manner.  So, I stood up and demanded he treat us with dignity and decency like he was talking to human beings, not animals or caricatures of villains in drag.  The next thing he would do is to release from segregation a man whom I had reported under Prison Rape Elimination Act procedures for trying to coerce me through intimidation into submitting to him as my “pimp” and becoming a prostitute.  I refused this man, Tyrone Brown, and then I reported him, so he was taken to segregation until Mark Gutierrez released him after that fateful town hall.  And predictably, Brown tried to cut my throat with a razor studded weapon because that is what everyone knows happens in a prison when you “snitch”.  Right and wrong have nothing to do with it.  That’s just the way it is in federal prison even if it is evil and insane.  People are brutal.  So Brown lay in wait for me to ambush me, and tried to cut my throat.  He didn’t succeed, but he did injure me and force me into the segregation unit.

 

Once there, Gutierrez asked the TEC based on numerous false statements, to send me to a place where I would be locked in a cell away from all human contact for 24 hours per day called the Secure Administrative Unit.  A whole building where 5 out of 144,000 BOP inmates are isolated from the rest of the entire system.  My psychologist objected, but the TEC did not listen to him.  It wanted to use this opportunity to hurt me.  So it sent me to this dark hole in Pennsylvania. 

 

Two months after my arrival to the SAU unit itself, I needed a biopsy in a hospital setting to determine if I had breast cancer.  I had to dress in a gown for the procedure.  But when it was time to get dressed, Lieutenant K. Ackley had other plans.  So, he told the officers to all step out and he locked the door.  On his him was a trigger to a 50,000-volt stun device affixed to my body, on the other side was his loaded firearm and 2 spare clips of ammunition.  He told me to remove my gown, reached out to squeeze my breasts and then pinched my nipples hard.  Then, in the ultimate indignity, he demanded I perform fellatio on him.  All I could think about as he asked me was the gun in his hip.  But I did what he demanded even if it meant I gagged and cried wishing the whole time I would I would just die I felt violated.  I felt dirty. So dirty a thousand hot showers could never scrub from me the filth he left upon my body.  He ejaculated into a paper towel and then made me throw it away.  He told me to get dressed and told me if I snitched on him, I would never go home again.

 

But I did report him. And the BOP did everything it could to protect him.  He was never suspended for investigation for even a single day.  There was no rape kit, no medical exam in a hospital either.  Just 4 hostile male officers, and a confused male nurse to examine me, and the whole-time fingers digging into my arms so painfully hard they left bruises the shape of their fingertips for a week.  Since I reported Lt. Ackley for raping me.  I have been the target of non-stop hell from his brother officers who curse me, misgender me, and show their hatred for me every single day.  Like too many women in America, I was raped and nobody fucking cared.  Least of all the TEC who put me in this prison in the first place.

 

Timethea Pullen, Alison and Karl Leukefeld, Jeffrey Burkett, Donald Lewis, Shannon Robbins, and Brandi Reynolds would be asked to transfer me after the rape, and they said NO.  They stepped in to block my transfer to a medium security facility to prevent me from being relocated to a Residential Drug Abuse Program.  But no, they make me stay with the man who raped me in the same facility.  They keep me in solitary confinement where his allies in uniform harass and misgender me daily for him.  The TEC knows that he might rape me again, and they are perfectly comfortable with leaving me where he can do so.  The trauma of this rape weighs heavy on my mind and tears at my heart.  Those names will be burned into my mind forever, because they are the reason this happened to me, only standing second to the actual rapist. 

 

I will remember their names forever.  The names that will be reported in the news media, and on the internet forever and always, as the people who put me in this place where I was raped and then kept me in the same facility of my rapist who got away with it in the era of #MeToo.

 

I hope as a member of the Judiciary Committee you will add my story to so many others , the victims of sexual abuse in the BOP by staff.  These names should be part of the record also, for imposing on me isolation, rape, pain, suffering, anguish and despair.  Who responded to my rape with simple “so what? who cares” attitude.  Soon, the story will be posted on www.gracepinson.com and I encourage you to read about it in Mother Jones and The Marshall Project websites as well.  The Judiciary Committee needs to focus an inquiry on male facilities too, because this is where the TEC keeps trans women and lets them get raped and abused by men.

 

Sincerely

Jeremy “Grace” Pinson